IT TOOK ME A WEEK TO open the personal effects bag the hospital gave me.
We had the funeral on a Sunday, at the church in Park Slope where we were supposed to be married. Tobias’s parents picked up bagels and Jessica wrote and read a poem. We all wore color because I thought it’s what you do when you’re not trying to be somber, when you’re trying to celebrate life. But I was mourning. I was wearing a red dress, one Tobias had liked, but inside I felt black.
Matty came and sat next to me, and then after we walked the city for twelve hours, barely speaking. He seemed to understand that there were no words to make it livable and didn’t bother trying. We were together in that grief, and that was something. I was grateful for that. To be with someone else who had really known him.
Afterward I sat on the floor of our bedroom and slid the manila envelope out of the plastic wrapping. I took a breath in and held it, like I was preparing to go underwater. Inside was his cell phone, wallet, a subway card, and a ring box. I opened it immediately. It was not the ring I’d given him back but the other one, the first one we’d seen. The one we fought over, that was too expensive. He’d gone back and bought it.
The thought that still felt too hot to think, like if I gave it any time it would burn me alive, was what he was doing on my street corner. He came running out of nowhere, the driver had said.
He was running to me. And now, I knew, he was running across with this ring in his pocket. It could only mean one thing: he had come to get me. Our time apart had come to an end just as he’d decided he wanted us to be together.
My heart seized. I thought surely I’d die right along with him. In that moment, I wanted to. Because the alternative was just too cruel. To know, so clearly, that he was coming back to make it work. That he had saved up, presumably, over our time apart and bought this ring, the first we’d seen, to make a new promise, a bigger one—I didn’t know how to live with that.
The ring was beautiful, just as I’d remembered. I slipped it out of its black velvet seat and put it on my hand. It fit perfectly. It was dazzling—it picked up the afternoon light and sent it cascading everywhere—on the wooden floor below me, off the white walls. “It’s beautiful,” I said out loud.
I couldn’t explain why, in that moment, I thought about the old ring and what had happened to it. Had he brought it back to Ingrid and traded it in? Did he pawn it? Was it still somewhere buried underneath his stuff? Matty hadn’t gone through his things yet. We said we’d do it together, but I didn’t know when either of us would be ready, or if we ever would be. The thought of folding his jeans, taking down his shirts, sifting through his photos? Impossible.
I wore the ring all day, and then I put it back in its box and hid it under my bed where his photograph used to be.